Social
media networks and certain popular culture forms have invested the word “jihad”
with the power by its mere affixation to any other, to impart deeply sinister connotations.
“Love jihad” is perhaps where the convention originated. It has since moved on.
The most recent eruptions of public furore over a supposed “corporate jihad”
are connected to events in Nashik, a growing hub of industry and services, some
200 km northeast of Mumbai.
The story began on a Marathi news channel and
its associated X account, the evening of April 9. As the English commentary
accompanying the news capsule on X explained, the charges ranged from
manipulated romantic relationships, sexual harassment, molestation, forced consumption
of beef and insults to the Hindu religion. It had been uncovered following the
strange conduct of a woman employee who had taken to wearing a burqa and
observing the Ramzan fast in March.
On April 10,
a lawyer associated with the Maharashtra unit of the BJP posted a virtually identical narration
on his X-account,
by which time a WhatsApp storm had begun to brew. The first group posts
mentioned the sweeping arrests at an office engaged in IT work in Nashik. In some
accounts, the office was part of the global network of the Tata Consultancy
Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services enterprise. By other accounts, it
was an independent unit doing contract work for the IT giant. Some seven professionals,
all with names readily identified with the Muslim faith, were reported arrested
on charges of sexual harassment and forced religious conversions.
On April
11, Opindia, a website strongly associated with the BJP,
credited an undercover operation with having brought out sordid details of
insults to Hindu deities, coerced performance of Islamic worship, and the
force-feeding of taboo meat dishes to several of the employees of the Nashik
unit. Seven policewomen, with great courage and guile, had evidently penetrated
the TCS unit, and caught the culprits “red-handed” after supposedly witnessing,
first-hand, how “Hindu women employees (faced) sexual harassment and religious
persecution”.
A little
known Hindi YouTube channel the same day, ran a story full of dire warnings that Hindu honour was
under threat from corporate culture and the “jihad mentality”. It was a story
captioned with the promise that corporate enterprises would do a thorough
background check on prospective employees, if they belonged to the Muslim
faith.
The website
of the RSS weekly, Organiser, carried a report the day after, detailing a
pattern of coercion, humiliation and insults based on religion. An unnamed male
employee spoke at length of the relentless insults he had to suffer from two of
his seniors in the corporate hierarchy, both of course, of the Muslim faith. The
report rounded off with a reminder, just in case the reader was distracted by
the complicated story line: the whole matter began to be investigated after a
female employee in March complained of physical intimacies with one of the
accused men, followed by broken promises of matrimony, and blackmail threats.
She also spoke of a pattern of harassment based on faith and belief, stretching
back to July 2022.
It took a while
for the story to gain traction in mainstream media. On April 13, the Gautam
Adani owned NDTV published an account on its news portal, while the associated
channel in its primetime news broadcast, bragged about bringing out the
“full truth”. On April 14, the primetime anchor welcomed viewers
with the narrative that NDTV had “set the agenda” on the sordid events in
Nashik, and indeed, “shamed other news outlets into breaking their silence”.
Meanwhile an X-post by a person with no clearly identifiable
credentials was circulating on WhatsApp, with the embellishment of a picture
taken from the promotional material created for a TV serial involving seven
women police who do great acts of derring-do.
All TV
channels by this time had joined the effort at finding more salacious and
sordid depths, including the possibility of funding from abroad and a sinister
link with a recent bomb blast in Delhi’s Red Fort area. The ratings game left
them no alternative.
In the
midst of all this, the Indian Express ran a story datelined Nashik, April
13 (published in
print on April 14 and since updated), quoting the TCS top management’s
admission of possible error in not having kept a stricter watch over complaints
emanating from its Nashik unit. A senior management source was quoted saying
that an oral complaint had been received from one female employee about
unwanted romantic attentions from a person senior to her in the hierarchy.
Nothing though, had been committed to writing.
Local
police had evidently been alerted to the strange behaviour of a female employee
who had begun observing the Ramzan fast and “living in an Islamic manner”
(whatever that may mean). Once the local police contacted the family of the
woman in question, her family had stopped her from going to work. This had in
turn, led to the creation of an undercover team to infiltrate the TCS
establishment in Nashik.
It seems
increasingly clear that the whole operation was a “sting” carried out with
political motives. In its print edition of April 16, the Indian Express reported that the entire fracas was caused
by one romantic relationship gone wrong. It involved precisely one employee of
the unit, no more.
By
implication, the rest of the story was manufactured by the local police with
the obvious intent of pleasing the political masters in Mumbai.
The TCS
Nashik episode holds several warnings for the Indian media as it descends
collectively into a state of abject servitude to power.
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